Ronald FUCK-ing Reagan: My Very First Enemy

It’s been a very eventful month. Ronald Reagan died for about half of it. Then Dick Cheney carried on his memory nicely this week by telling a Democratic Senator who questioned the fact that Cheney destroyed Iraq just so Halliburton could rebuild it to “go fuck [him]self” on the Senate floor. Committing horrible crimes that cost thousands of human lives and then telling anyone who stands up to you to go fuck himself? Ronald Reagan’s memory lives on.

I, like Senator Tom Leahy, was shocked-shocked!-to hear that kind of language on the Senate floor. There is a time and a place for the F-word, and that is when you are explaining politics to your toddler.

When I was but a wee irate leftist, I would hear my irate leftist parents exclaim, “FUCK-ing Reagan!” all the time.

And so I would ask them, as any well-informed leftist should, “Why do you hate Reagan?”

And they would say, “Because he’s an ASSHOLE.”

My parents elaborated on this claim, and so I learned to hate Republicans, conservatives, liars, mentally incompetent people elected to or placed in positions of power, rich motherfuckers who think they’re special, delusional Californian actor-politicians, inferior actors and Ronald Reagan, because he is all of those things. I spent the first eight years of my conscious life hating Ronald Reagan. He was my very first enemy.

Remembering Ronald Reagan takes me back to simpler time, a more optimistic time. It was a time when I thought we had one enemy, and his name was Ronald Reagan. In 1988, I was horrified to find out that the George Bush, then the vice-president, was going to become president. “But won’t that be like Reagan being president again, Mommy?”

“George Bush used to be the director the CIA, so he’s the only thing worse than Reagan. Do you know what they did, Emily?”

“No, what, Mommy?”

“The CIA are the ones who trained the Contras. The CIA trains the killers, and then the killers our government trains go to other countries and kill the people there who support governments that our government doesn’t agree with, and they say the killers are the freedom fighters and they people they kill are the guerillas, but it’s the other way around.”

That was when I began to understand that our enemy was not one man, but a set of organizations with a complicated but unified ideology that allowed them to commit heinous acts and then appropriate language that actually meant the complete and total opposite of what they used it to describe to explain or deny these heinous acts and create an impenetrable yet completely alternate reality that was intolerable to anyone with a real sense of morality, truth or justice.

“But Mom, if Reagan and Bush killed all those people, why is everyone voting for them?”

“Because a lot of the people in this country are ASSHOLES. And they don’t know about this stuff, and if they do know it, they don?t want to believe it.”

“Then how did you find out about it, Mom?”

“It’s on public radio.”

“Hey, Mom, can I have M & M’s?”

“No, you can have a rice cake with peanut butter on it.”

(Why do parents who giveth the gift of political awareness taketh away the good snacks? Often it is because their kids are allergic. It all works out, because a kid who is 1) allergic and 2) mouthing off about Ronald Reagan at age seven is going to have plenty of time for quiet, solitary reading. People should be more understanding about the weird behavior of leftists. A lot of leftists are lame and the sandals and fleece socks are really unforgivable, but a lot of leftists are allergic. They can’t help it. They have a lot of weird allergies that force them to turn to public radio for effective health alternatives to expensive pharmeceuticals, and then they also hear about the horrific acts their government commits and so they live, allergic and truthful, in an America full of dairy, sugar and lies.)

I hope they do put Ronald Reagan on money. That way, one day I can teach my own children about all the fucking genocidal maniacs who ran this country just by taking them to the store. “That’s Andrew Jackson, kids, and he killed all the Native Americans. And this here is Ronald Reagan, and he killed the gay people, the Haitians, the heroin addicts, and thousands of South American civilians. These men are not your heroes, kids, they’re killers.”

Goodbye, Ronnie. You’ve been gone three weeks and I’m still finding all kinds of ways to honor your legacy.